New Zealand recorded its hottest June on record as temperatures continued to soar in a pattern consistent with global warming, a government scientific agency said Tuesday.

Emergency services in Azerbaijan on Monday were gauging the environmental fallout of a mud volcano eruption in the Caspian Sea, the latest occurrence of the natural phenomenon in the oil-rich nation.

The eruption occurred Sunday evening near the island of Dashlyg in the vicinity of offshore oil and gas fields, with plumes of fire reaching 100 meters (330 feet) above the sea, Azerbaijan's national seismological center said in a statement.

Firefighters in Cyprus said Monday they had brought under control the island's worst blaze on record, which ripped through mountain forests and farmland, killing four people and destroying scores of homes. 

Water-bombing planes from Greece and Israel and British aircraft from bases on the Mediterranean island helped douse the huge fire, which blackened 55 square kilometers (21 square miles) of the Troodos Mountains.

Huge solar panels poke out of pumpkin and tomato fields in Syria's rebel-held northwest, where after infrastructure was destroyed during a decade of war, many have switched to renewable energy.

Cyprus search crews discovered the bodies of four people outside a fire-swept mountain village on Sunday in what a government minister called the "most destructive" blaze in the east Mediterranean island nation's history.

Nicos Nouris said that Civil Defense volunteers discovered the remains just outside the village of Odou on the southern edge of the Troodos mountain range.

Two bodies were found after a huge landslide at a resort town in central Japan swept away homes on Saturday following days of heavy rain, with around 20 people still missing, officials said.

Canada's government has warned of a "long and challenging summer" ahead as it prepared military aircraft to help evacuate towns and fight more than 100 wildfires fueled by a record-smashing heat wave.

Dozens of fires raged across western Canada and California on Friday with little relief expected from a deadly heat wave that has seen temperatures hit record highs.

Around 1,000 people were evacuated in Canada's British Columbia province Thursday when a wildfire burnt down 90 percent of a small town that had set a national high-temperature record for three days running. 

Hundreds of people were evacuated in western Canada as fires added to the unprecedented heat wave in the region, which for days has been baking in record-breaking temperatures.

Millions of people in western Canada and the northwestern United States were under heat alerts Wednesday as the region baked in record-breaking temperatures and police reported scores of deaths likely linked to the scorching conditions.

The heat wave has stretched emergency services, with at least 134 people dying suddenly since Friday in the Vancouver area and hundreds more across British Columbia, according to Canadian police and the local coroner.